Complexica has raised money from Acorn Capital pushing the total raised past $31m

Artificial intelligence firm Complexica has pushed the total amount it has raised in the past two years past $30m, bringing on Acorn Capital as a new shareholder.

Complexica chief executive Matt Michalewicz.

Artificial intelligence firm Complexica has raised $6.5m from Acorn Capital bringing its total funds raised to more than $31m since 2021.

Acorn joins previous investors on the register including Perennial Partners, listed entities Microequities Asset Management and MA Financial, and strategic investor and Complexica customer Flinders Ports, which owns and operates nine ports in South Australia.

Complexica develops and implements software applications used by large enterprise customers to digitalise and optimise their sales, marketing, and supply chain activities.

Its customers include Pfizer, global wine giant Pernod Ricard, Metcash and Endeavour Group.

Chief executive Matt Michalewicz said the funds raised would be used for organic growth as well as merger and acquisition opportunities.

“We are very happy to announce the addition of Acorn Capital to Complexica’s shareholder base, with whom we’ve developed a great working relationship during the past year,” Mr Michalewicz said.

“Acorn’s $6.5m investment will be used for expansion and M&A purposes, with some exciting announcements already in the works.

“As predicted, 2023 is turning out to be a monumental year for the business, putting us in a fantastic position for growth and expansion this year and beyond.”

Acorn investment director Matt Sheehan said they had been engaged with Complexica for almost a year to date.

“In that time we’ve been able to get to know Matt and the team well and have been impressed with Complexica’s vision and its ability to win significant enterprise customers,’’ he said.

“We’re excited to be part of Complexica and look forward to assisting Matt and the team realise the full potential of the company.”

Mr Michalewicz and his team, which includes his father and the company’s chief scientist Zbigniew Michalewicz and chief software architect Constantin Chiriac, founded SolveIt Software, which they sold to French multinational Schneider Electric in 2012, before going on to co-found Complexica.

The latter company’s Decision Cloud technology is designed to help companies make better decisions in situations where there is a large amount of data, beyond the capacity of human managers to absorb and use in a timely manner.

Complexica late last year signed electricity grid operator SA Power Networks as a client, providing it with predictive tools for asset maintenance and replacement.

The company’s proprietary AI/machine learning engine, Larry the Digital Analyst, has been set up to be able to forecast the probability of equipment failure, allowing the grid manager to focus on work orders targeting assets at higher risk of faults.

“To do this manually would require the identification of equipment at potential risk of failure through manual analysis of historical replacement data, audit data, and many other data sets, along with external factors such as weather, proximity to water, and bushfire zones, among others,’’ Complexica said at the time.

“Larry the Digital Analyst automates this extensive analysis and at its core is made up of a variety of smart algorithms such as Bayesian networks, artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms, among others.

“These algorithms perform certain tasks – such as data collection, augmentation, predictive modelling, trade-off analysis, optimisation and so forth – to provide optimised decision recommendations to end users.’’

Originally published as Complexica has raised money from Acorn Capital pushing the total raised past $31m